The recent Screen Awards mocked the gay community and yet was lapped up by several gay people
Heterosexuals, in the Hindi film industry at any rate, are a jaded lot. The only way they seem to find some variety in their sad and pathetic lives is to dress up as their conception of gay men (which is only drag) and do what they think is the only thing gay men do (which is camp it up). Now, while I am not one of those innumerable femininity and women-hating gay men on guys4men and countless other such sites making clear that they do not want femmes, girlish men, swishy queens and that such types should keep away (what I say is ‘Chhaa ja raaniyon!’ which is what the supercool hijra in Welcome to Sajjanpur says), I can’t help feeling this homogenisation of the gay subject by the Hindi film industry is a tad exploitative and tired.
Take the Nokia Screen awards that recently had the Bombay papers all agog. Hosts Sajid Khan and Shreyas Talpade donned the greasepaint and some hideous clothes and hammed it up. As if Dostana was not bad enough in terms of squeezing the cheapest jokes out of bum-banditry (by the way Irrfan Khan uses this word in the opening shots of the equally unbearable Slumdog Millionaire and it is such a specifically British term of abuse that no Bombay policeman, however sophisticated, would know it and even if one did, would not use it on a Dharavi slum boy who would not make any sense of it anyway) and not knowing when to stop, these two went at it hammer and tongs as well.
Blockhead John Abraham obliged. He said he missed Abhishek’s chest hair. We missed John’s brain, as usual. Abhishek and John won the ‘Best Couple’ award in the cheapest gimmick, though not cheaper than the fake ‘gay’ relationship and, most of all, the fake kiss in the film for which they won the award, and then it was back to Sajid’s and Shreyas’ bawdy jokes and bad make-up. Aishwarya plasticine prig Rai and Bipasha behnji buffalo Basu giggled and accepted the award on behalf of their men. These women think we gay men are silly jokes, to be giggled and chuckled at while they are the real thing, safe in their Symbolic stupidity.
But what’s even more offensive is the segment of the LGBT community (or are they the neocon ‘queers’?) who lap up this
nonsense, who are so grateful for being mocked at in Dostana, who bleat to the media about how wonderful this award from Nokia is, who call this is a historical breakthrough. That they mistake their acceptance of this offensive s**t (as opposed to nice lover’s s**t in an S/M deal) as an ability to laugh at themselves just shows their desperation to be in the limelight, and the depths they’ll plumb just for a little visibility, even if it is only to have s**t thrown in their faces and on their lives.
There is absolutely NOTHING positive or worth taking home from a film like Dostana, as several columns on this page have already shown. When will we ever grow up and realise that sometimes no representation at all is better than some utterly retrograde variety of it? When will we let straight people know that they cannot take the substance of our difficult lives and make some gossamer claptrap out of it?
I guess one of the realities we are going to have to deal with is the large contingent of rightwing, neoliberal LGBT and ‘queer’ folk among us. Shallow, apolitical, feeding off the NGO monsterworld, these folk have no qualms about leeching off the market even if it spits on them and peels them off to stamp on them. They dig that stuff. They love the limelight even if it involves nothing more than having buckets of p**s thrown on them (so, not in the nice watersports kinda way) while in the charmed spotlight. Truly, with friends like this, who needs enemies?